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Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: Oscar Quest ’25 continues! Once again we see how many among the latest wave of Academy Award nominees I can catch before the big ABC ceremony. Every year it’s a lively ballroom dance between new voices and For Your Oscar Consideration familiarity. Sometimes it’s two for the price of one.

Academy Award Winner RaMell Ross won that honorific with the live-action short film Hale County This Morning, This Evening back in 2019. This year the director scored another shot at the trophies with his first full-length feature, Nickel Boys — a period-piece drama about a subject familiar to longtime Oscar fans, not to mention historians and other decent folks still working and/or waiting for social sciences to discover the cure for American racism. To differentiate the film from past exemplars, Ross conducts an extended experiment with the narrative vantage approach that’s seemed revolutionary to scores of film critics whose only pastime is movies.

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